 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | | | | | | |
March/April 2009 Received wisdom about the impact the invention of photography had on painting tells us that, once relieved of its former obligation to record appearances, painting spun off into outer space on a journey of experimental discovery. It took a trifling eighty years from that 1839 liberation to boldly reach that reductio ad absurdam of the avant garde, Malevich’s all-white picture. Painting went from Ingres and Turner to a blank canvas in the same time it took four centuries earlier to get from Donatello’s David to Michelangelo’s David. Thus was photography an unwitting midwife to the avant garde. It is no accident, therefore, that those artists from that first of the ‘Modern Movements’, the Impressionists, were all born around the time of photography’s announcement. Alfred Sisley, for example, was born to English parents in Paris in October 1839, a mere nine months after Daguerre and Fox Talbot had first spoken publicly of their competing processes. Young Alfie was educated for a time in London and visited England and Wales twice briefly to paint, but he was a Frenchman despite the fact that books persist in referring to him as ‘The English Impressionist’. The National Gallery recently showed a score of paintings by him which had been done during his English and Welsh sojourns in 1874 and 1897. I won’t address the work because it simply isn’t worth it: Sisley appears to have saved his most casual efforts for these visits – the later Welsh works in particular are feeble pastiches of the finest Impressionism, all soapsuds and unappetising worms of impasto. Horrible things. As tends to be the case generally with the Impressionists, the earlier the work the harder Sisley seemed to be trying. Soon after the opening in April 1874 of the First Impressionist Exhibition – which was, coincidentally, held in portrait photographer Nadar’s Paris studio – Sisley visited London. The summery works painted here in the open air near Hampton Court and upstream at Molesey weir reveal an artist who, far from having been freed by photography, was clearly in thrall to it. Most serious painters may have dismissed the camera in public as a mere mechanical device but they nevertheless kept a close eye on what it did – and many of these painters we now know took photographs themselves and assiduously studied and aped the results. It is true that in Sisley’s London paintings the execution is looser than in any finished landscapes hitherto in the history of art (excepting those by his French vanguard colleagues), but in composition their unconventional viewpoints are clearly inspired by knowledge of landscape and urban photographs. For example, Sisley dares to give us the photographer’s eye view straight across the river from underneath Hampton Court bridge. A decade or more before the Impressionists arrived on the scene photographers had realised that the textbook rules of pictorial composition were there to be tested. Failure being relatively inexpensive, it has always been in the nature of photography that it can afford to think the unthinkable. Among its chief advantages is that a predictable account of a subject can be quickly followed by another more adventurous one, if only to see what happens. The Impressionists broke with conventions but, I would suggest, this was only because photographers had first encouraged their experiments. After visiting the National Gallery, I wanted to test this theory by looking at the landscape photographs of Sisley’s contemporaries. To my astonishment there was nowhere to do this. No gallery in this the country where photography was invented, and where in the second half of the 19th century the new medium was wrestled in all directions, exists to show the fascinating story of photography. For 19th century painting we visit the National and Tate Galleries and any number of fine regional collections, but there is nowhere with the same responsibility for photography. Although the public owns thorough historical collections of photographs in the V & A and in what is now dubbed the National Media Museum in Bradford, both of these places have effectively given up on a scholarly approach to the medium, preferring instead the sort of fashionable, trivial contemporary material which might be seen everywhere else and which is claimed to have mass appeal. There is no museum dedicated to photography where an intrigued student might examine the standard history laid out and illustrated and perhaps, from time to time, augmented with specialist exhibitions. Where are the thousands of photography students supposed to go to learn? The answer is that they remain ignorant of everything that doesn’t appear in newsstand magazines or forbiddingly expensive books of necessarily limited circulation. What is the point of our national collection of photographs, all those thousands of treasures inherited from the immeasurably rich Kodak Collection and the Royal Photographic Society, being stuck up in a dump like Bradford where they are hardly ever exhibited? Where can we see the amateur secessionists who were the photographic contemporaries of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism? Nowhere. They should be on display and certainly always in London. The National Media Museum, by the way, is nothing of the kind. Having started seriously as a museum of photography it is now little more than a children’s playground where exhibitions of family snaps, 3-D films and popular genres such as fashion photography are presented as a substitute for learning. Like so many other museums, this one has sadly fallen for, firstly, the anti-history biases of our debased school curriculums, which consider ancient history to have happened before 1914, and secondly, the urgings of manipulative Culture Ministers who threaten museums to make them appeal to a constituency otherwise uninterested in either art or history. It strikes me that the display of photography’s history might be a job for the Photographers’ Gallery. In their new London premises they boast five floors and god knows how much square-footage. Surely it isn’t too much to ask of them (for their close on a million pounds a year of public subsidy) that they allocate a single room to mounting changing shows of historical work from the national collections. If nothing else this would balance their absurd over-dependence on ‘challenging contemporary art photography’ that was frequently so instantly forgettable in the later years at the gallery’s old premises.
The good fortune of living in a country with a long history is that one doesn’t need to be in an art gallery to experience something stimulating to look at. Walking down almost any London street, for example, provides a feast of competing architectural styles, sculptural flourishes and swaggers, and designs both uplifting and abysmal. And how often do we stop in places we think we know well and realise we hadn’t noticed that before? With this in mind I always arrive sufficiently early for trains to allow half an hour for poking about in the station. One of few bits of wisdom I’ve discovered worth sharing is that the most nondescript town or city is likely to have an impressive railway station if you trouble to seek it out – in this, as well as in all matters visual and cultural, Birmingham is the noteworthy exception. Stations are now under threat. Not only are the fabrics allowed to deteriorate and any repairs insensitively botched by ill-trained, careless and pride-free artisans, but freedom of access has now advanced almost to the point of total ban. 160,000 people were stopped and questioned on stations last year and 27,000 of them were asked to account for their presence. I myself recently received a ticking off at Liverpool Lime Street for photographing the filigree strapwork in the wide fanlight of the main shed. There are many recent examples of other railway enthusiasts being frogmarched from stations simply for taking pictures of trains. More generally, access to platforms is routinely denied and the sale of platform tickets has been stopped. Rail operators – who are pressured to limit access to their facilities by Ministers who make the introduction of barriers a precondition of awarding franchises – claim this is necessary to stop fare dodgers, yet there is no evidence that anything approaching the cost of installing, maintaining and manning automatic barriers is recovered by resulting fare gains. There is also claimed to be a security issue. Trainspotters – and we are the only country in the world ever colonised by this strange and endangered species – are suspected of being terrorists in disguise. Since when was a terrorist a fat white bloke pushing sixty armed only with an Instamatic and an Ian Allan combine? May I suggest that the easiest way to establish if any trainspotter is a disguised terrorist is to ask a simple question, such as ‘What does co-co mean?’ If they happen not to know, are Levantine in coloration and are carrying a rucksack, run for it. Otherwise leave them alone or they’ll bore you to death with jargon concerning motored axles. Many art purists will disagree but, for some, stations are like art galleries. Preventing access to them unless you are a traveller stops everyone enjoying historical architecture sometimes of enlightened technical originality and unique functional beauty. That most perfect of all railway stations, York, which serves as a town thoroughfare and meeting place as much as a great spectacle of novel Victorian engineering, is to introduce barriers preventing access to its sweetly arcing platforms and beguiling perspectives. This is yet another small victory for what has become an epidemic of philistinism in public policy.
Never was the reputation of the ‘expert’ more shot than now. We imagined that all those ennobled bankers and economists were telling us the truth and knew what they were doing. But for all their international prizes and eye-watering bonuses, we sensible people did know better after all. You didn’t need to be Adam Smith to know something was eventually going to give. Our failure was to assume that these experts had some mathematical ingenuity up their sleeve which we, at our extremity of common ignorance, couldn’t possible have thought of. But it was all a whopping great lie. Most of them didn’t even have any banking qualifications. They were flying blind, following the bloke in front and making it up as they went along. Now let me think a moment ... what does this remind me of? The State Art system operates on a similar basis of intimidation and assumed knowledge. It has always believed its bluff won’t be called because they are experts, we are told, and we are just ill-informed dopes without their preternatural insights. We take it for granted when State Art’s priests and apostles tell us that this, here, is a work of challenging distinction, even when it looks like a straggle of trash unworthy of a lazy teenager. We are gullibly seduced by their solemn claims to expertise. Thus, their lores and mantras have all coalesced through endless repetition into a seemingly unquestionable Holy Writ. And so, like the discredited bankers, these types are in an unimpeachable position to inflict their narrow orthodoxies upon us. I believe that those at the pinnacle of State Art have been deceiving us for decades with their own South Sea Bubble. And now there is a distinct whiff of worry in the air. Interestingly, the collapse of the contemporary art market has forced some footsoldiers at the periphery of State Art – most conspicuously the credulous commentators who took dictation from on high – to start thinking for themselves and questioning some of its shakier principles and reputations. What’s the betting that within a few months we’ll have an earnest Brown-like mea culpa from President-for-life Serota: ìI got us into this mess ... but I’m also the best person to get us out of it!!î Will the lesson then be learned? Or will they simply rebuild the same flawed model? Don’t hold your breath. David Lee | |||||
 | |||||
Leaders | |||||
 | |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
Take me to All of this site is | |||||
| | | | | |